


Separate Yourself, Integrate Yourself (When The Time Comes)

by sartiebodyshots



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Gen, Lesbian Courier, Possible Canon Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-12
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2019-06-09 03:03:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15258009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sartiebodyshots/pseuds/sartiebodyshots
Summary: August comes to Nipton.





	Separate Yourself, Integrate Yourself (When The Time Comes)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Outskirts of Paradise" by Bad Suns; thank you Spotify for introducing me to it.

August has had one hell of a week.  She’s been dug out of a grave, ran off some bandits, and started her pursuit of the people who left her for dead and made off with her package.  All she really remembers, before her perfectly clear memory of getting shot in the head, is her name and that she’s travelled a long way. 

Now, she’s looking for answers, which mostly seems to involve wandering the Mojave and getting involved in everyone else’s affairs.  Not that she wants to have been left in her grave, but that probably would’ve been easier. 

There’s smoke ahead, which matches the big grey clouds hanging low in the sky.  There’s electric in the air, a rumble far away but moving closer. 

“I won the lottery!  I won!” a man yells, running towards her.

He runs past her before August can say a word, and she watches him go.  August is tempted to run after him, to see what he’s going on about, but something drags her forward.  Plus, rain seems imminent now, and the town up ahead seems like a decent place to find shelter.

When she gets close enough to the town- Nipton, according to her Pip-boy- she pauses as a cold stone sinks into her gut.  It takes her a moment to understand what is causing the overwhelming feelings of foreboding, and then she’s only more confused.  

There are people hanging from crosses.  She approaches one, in a bit of a daze, trying to figure out how to get the man down without hurting him further; he’s so weak that she can’t find a way.  Even if she could, there are too many.

“Do you want me to end your suffering?” August asks.  

The man nods, groaning in pain, and August pulls out her knife.  She's tall, so it's not too hard to slide it through his ribcage. 

She goes down the line, asking each person.  August gives mercy to those who ask for it and she says a small word of comfort to those who don't.  Her hands turn red with blood.

It's sad work, made sadder by the haunting familiarity of people hanging from crosses near death.  August can’t place where, or when, or who, or why, but her brain screams at her that she’s seen something like this before.  

Her breath doesn’t fill her lungs.  She thinks for a moment that it’s begun to rain, but she realizes that tears have traced their way down her cheeks.  There is an overbearing familiarity here that August shies away from; she doesn’t want to know what’s hiding in her broken memories, not if this is familiar.  

“Don’t worry, I won't have you lashed to a cross like the rest of these degenerates,” a voice says.  “In fact, it’s useful you happened by. I want you to witness what happened here in Nipton, Profligate.  And when you move on, I want you to tell everyone- especially NCR troops- the lessons Caesar’s Legion taught here.”

August had been so absorbed in her work and her turmoil that she hadn’t noticed the man standing there.  She wipes the tears from her eyes before turning around. 

The man who spoke isn’t alone, but he’s easy to identify as the leader.  He’s wearing some kind of animal head as a helmet. It should be a humorous sight, but the devastation surrounding them casts a somber tint on the whole thing.

“What lesson would that be, exactly?” August asks, voice catching in her throat.  

“Oh, where to begin?  That they are weak, and we are strong? This much was known already,” the man muses.  “But the depths of their moral sickness, their dissolution? Nipton serves as the perfect object lesson.”

August tilts her head, thinking.  “So you slaughtered innocents to make some kind of philosophical point?”

“Innocents?  Hardly,” the man says.  “They cared not for who they did business with, as long as they received their due, and thought nothing of selling out those they had granted shelter to, until they realized that they were caught in the trap as well.”

“Still seems a bit extreme, even if some of them were assholes,” August says.

The man is sneering at her at this point, and his disdain only grows more apparent as he keeps talking.  

“They outnumbered us, and yet they had not the nerve to put up any resistance.  Instead, they clutched at their tickets as I announced that some of them would live, with no thought given to their so called loved ones,” the man says.  “They cared only for their own well being as we burned their fellows on pyres, hung them on crosses. What happened, they allowed.”

Thunder rumbles in the distance, announcing the presence of big, fat raindrops.  They seep into August’s clothes, quickly chilling her and casting a new drabness over the landscape.  

“This is what the Legion does.  This is the Legion’s justice,” August says hollowly, looking around. 

“You catch on quick for a Profligate and a woman,” the man says.

There’s a flash in her memory-  _ ground hard underneath knees, a man’s head cradled in her lap, pain, anguish, shame.  Why couldn’t she keep him- them- safe? He’s not breathing so she’s not breathing either because she can’t lose him _ \- and before she can process it, the man has turned away.

A righteous anger surges through her.  Anger for the dead and dying around her, anger for the man in her fractured memory, anger for herself.  There's not a lot she can fix right now, but she can fix this. 

“Hey!  Hey dick face!” August yells as she surges forward.  “Fuck your Legion!”

The man and his squad all turn around, and so her fist- still clenching the knife- collides with his face.  It's a frenzied blur after that, all sloshing in the mud and knife slashes and hard bone. 

Her brain comes back to her body as she's laying in the mud.  Her body doesn't ache; when she looks down at herself she realizes that it’s because she’s in an awful lot of straight up pain.  

There’s a gouge on her arm that’s bleeding, and one of her legs just looks wrong somehow.  She’s so covered in mud and blood that she’s not sure if she’s injured anymore than the obvious or what.  

August groans staring up at the sky.  It’s still raining from the giant, dark clouds looming overhead so thickly it looks like night.  Normally, that’d be soothing, but right now, it just makes her feel grosser. 

“You’ve gotta get up, Augusta.  You don’t have any other choice,” August intones.  

Somebody said that to her once, it feels like.  Maybe the dead man in her memories. 

August takes a deep breath- that hurts; there’s something wrong with her ribs- and drags herself to her feet.  Well, mostly just on her right foot. 

She realizes that she’s been screaming, and that doesn’t stop as she drags herself towards the nearest building.  The rain starts to feel closer to soothing now that she’s vertical. 

August cleans herself off as best she can as she makes her way.  It gets at least the top layer of grime off. 

“Are you fucking kidding me?  First I get my legs smashed, and in walks the Powder Ganger’s grim fucking reaper?  What the fuck have you got against us, bitch?”

August looks up in surprise as she walks into the most intact building.  She didn’t expect to run into anyone alive.

“Your friends attacked my friends first, and now they keep trying to kill me,” August says.  “I really don’t give a shit otherwise.”

“Real fucking sweet of you,” the man says.

August looks over the man and notices his broken legs.  He doesn’t look like he’d be able to stand, and he doesn’t have a gun either.  Not a threat. 

“I’m going to see if there’s anything of use in here.  Don’t… annoy me, and you don’t have anything to fear from me,” August says.  

“Listen, if you run across any Med-X, I could really use some.  To take the edge off of what those Legion fucks did to me,” the man says.  

August shrugs as she starts her slow exploration of the room, making sure to stay out of arm’s reach of the dude.  There’s nothing of particular value until she reaches the upstairs. A hole in the ceiling has let the rainwater start to gather in the tub sitting in the bathroom.  

“Oh, baby,” August murmurs.

Since she knows the man downstairs isn’t in any position to move, August strips off her clothes.  She stands under leak in the roof, rinsing off another layer of grime. It’s become surprising easy to ignore the immense pain that she’s in.  

When she’s as clean as she’s going to get, she takes the time to spread out her clothes under the hole, to hopefully get rid of some of the mud there, too.  

Then, she sinks into the tub, letting the water slosh over.  The water turns nearly immediately grungy, but August doesn’t care.  It soothes her somewhere deeper than her torn skin and empty bones. 

She needs to rinse out her hair more, so she slides her ass forward.  Her legs hang over the edge of the tub as she lets her head submerge. 

Sound blurs underwater, and her grimy hair slips through her fingers, getting cleaner.  August keeps her eyes pressed shut to keep the mud from getting into her eyes. 

After leaning up just enough to breathe, August sinks back under the water.  She lets her arms drift to her sides. 

August lays there in the water, wishing she could stay there forever.  There’s something peaceful about floating in the water. No struggle, no confusion, no missing memories or bodies on crosses.  Just this gentle peace.

Her lungs burn and complain, after a time.  If she keeps underwater, maybe she can push past it.  Maybe she doesn’t  _ need _ to breathe, and she just forgot.  

What a sight that would be, if someone were to stumble across the shack.  A grumpy, immobile powder ganger, and a naked, unbreathing woman submerged in a filthy tub, her legs dangling out the end.  

A sharp inhale of breath as her body puts an end to her experiment.  She does indeed need to breathe. Ah, well. 

August inhales, feeling air rushing through her lungs.  Her head feels light, like the empty, useless thing is about to float away.  

She grips the edge of the bathtub, now floating just on top of the water.  Her internal voice counts down from three and she hauls herself to a sitting position, then out of the tub.

The water is now a murky brown kind of color, and August feels sort of sick looking at it; there’s a vague, reddish undertone.  The sick feeling is too much, so she sits down on a decently clean looking part of the floor.

Even though she only means to sit down for a moment, two minutes later, she’s passed out again on the floor.

* * *

August wakes up.  It’s long enough later that it’s not only stopped raining, but the bright sun is beating down on her, and when she reaches over to touch her clothes, they’re dry.

There are bruises decorating  her rib cage and there’s a gouge in her leg that is going to take some time to heal.  Other than some other assorted bruising and scrapes, the rest of her looks mostly okay, so she digs into her pack and pulls out a stimpak and some strips of fabric.  

Wincing as she injects herself with the stimpak, August works on bandaging up her leg.  She’s not sure if her ribs are broken or not, but there’s not a lot she can do about it either way, so she just ignores it the best she can.  

Once she’s done, August dresses herself, checks the cabinets for anything useful, and then heads downstairs.  She’s surprised to see the powder ganger still alive.

“Thought you’d died up there,” the man says.  “Figured it’d get to stinkin’ soon.”

August shrugs.  “Sorry to disappoint.”

“Didja find any Med-X up there?” the man asks.

August shakes her head. 

“Then what are you good for?” the man retorts.

August shrugs.  She digs in her pack, moving slower than she’d like.  It's not a great situation, considering sure can barely shoot a gun.  Slashing with her knife is not going to be easy.

There’s not much food in her pack, but she manages to get together some purified water and fruit.  Not all of her supplies, but some at least. 

Without speaking to the man, she places it in easy reach of him.  She also places a shotgun, no shells, there as well.

“I’ll slide you some shells once I’m on my way out,” August says.  “Don’t quite trust you, otherwise.”

“What is this supposed to do for me?” the man asks.

August doesn’t answer, heading for the door instead.  She tosses the shells back at the powder ganger and gives him one last look over.  

“Good luck,” August says before closing the door.

The man shouts something behind her, but August has already left.  

Walking through town, there are more signs of death and destruction, but August has to ignore it.  August has places to be.


End file.
